Saudade
by MariaLujan
Summary: Saudade is a word in Portuguese that has no translation into other languages, and expresses the mixture of sadness, loneliness, nostalgia and happiness, which we often feel for something or someone.


"_Saudade for a brother who lives far off._

_Saudade for a childhood waterfall._

_Saudade for the flavor of a fruit never to be found again._

_Saudade for the father who died, for the imaginary friend who never existed…_

_Saudade for a city._

_Saudade for ourselves, when we see that time doesn't forgive us. All these saudades hurt._

_But the saudade that hurts the most is the one for someone beloved."_

_-Miguel Falabella._

Tears pricked her eyes and memories swirled in her mind.

Once she was a happy girl, running around, proudly answering the teacher's questions, playing and arriving home early to find her mother with freshly made tea for her. Mom would brush her hair before bed, and the next day she would wake her up with the smell of baked bread and a kiss.

Things changed too soon and Mom was gone, and the bread was not baked either, and the interest in answering the teacher's questions vanished as her laughter.

A tear fell on the sheet, and then another. None of that would come back. It had been too many years and winds of Aberdeen for the moments where she was a happy girl to envelop her and give her the comfort she needed. That little blonde girl never imagined everything she would suffer, the loneliness that would threaten her every moment. Now, as an adult woman, she wanted to hug that little girl that was herself and tell her to be prepared, that she should enjoy Mom more and not to make pranks, that she should run faster through the countryside and not think that goats were the worst thing that could happen to her.

Another tear fell and she tightened her knees more to her chin. She felt cold, almost the same cold when she waited for her mother nights and nights and she didn't come to cover her and tell her a story.

She thought of the cold she felt the morning she walked to the train station. Once she was a sad young woman, saying goodbye to her home and her dead parents, with the wind hitting her face and drying the tears before taking the train.

Nostalgia for her house, her village, her parents, became a custom that was not erased while she studied and tried to find her place in the world. Her life would not return, things had changed completely, she only had memories to laugh and most of the time, to cry.

She got out of bed and went to the window. From the beautiful garden of the sanatorium, almost nothing could be seen. It was a dark and closed night, like the night she entered the Mother House. Once she was a happy novice, eager to show what she knew and help people.

Poplar became her new home, so different from home that saw her born, but so her, so tucked under her flesh that now, in this unknown place full of unknown people, she missed it very much, with its good and bad things.

If she spoke, if she put into words what she was feeling, she would leave her home and her place forever, they would send her anywhere else, and she would miss, as now, her sisters, nurses, the sound of the phone shattering the silence in the night, she would miss her bike and Fred's pride every time he repairs a wheel, she would miss her patients and the grateful looks of mothers hugging their new babies.

Once she was a nun, but she didn't feel that way anymore.

Her God, the only one who accompanied her for so long when she felt lonely, was no longer there. He no longer listened to her desperate prayers. She was punished for him, she knew it, her illness was unfair and she wanted to rebel, she wanted to break her whole life and have a new one, where she didn't feel the nostalgia she felt so inside.

She barely touched the frozen glass of the window, still standing there, freezing. She missed him. If she felt so sad and lonely right now, it was because she missed him fiercely, because she needed to see his hands and eyes that were sometimes sad, sometimes cheerful, sometimes green and sometimes brown. Of everything she missed and would continue to miss, everything she felt nostalgic about, he was the most important thing. Because she didn't know what he was doing, what he felt, thought or dreamed, and she was so far away, so sick, so lonely. She couldn't tell him that she knew she had a heart because it hurt with every beat, but that her soul was completely with him.

Lying in her icy bed, she cried for the last time for what she had and lost, and for what she dreamed and could not have.


End file.
